And now, for the reading of a passage derived from nothing other than the finest literature:

*ahem*






"The “death house” in this particular prison was one of those crass erections and maintenances of human insensitiveness and stupidity principally for which no one primarily was really responsible. Indeed, its total plan and procedure were the results of a series of primary legislative enactments, followed by decisions and compulsions as devised by the temperaments and seeming necessities of various wardens, until at last — by degrees and without anything worthy of the name of thinking on any one’s part — there had been gathered and was now being enforced all that could possibly be imagined in the way of unnecessary and really unauthorized cruelty or stupid and destructive torture. And to the end that a man, once condemned by a jury, would be compelled to suffer not alone the death for which his sentence called, but a thousand others before that. For the very room by its arrangement, as well as the rules governing the lives and actions of the inmates, was sufficient to bring about this torture, willy-nilly.
It was a room thirty by fifty feet, of stone and concrete and steel, and surmounted some thirty feet from the floor by a skylight. Presumably an improvement over an older and worse death house, with which it was still connected by a door, it was divided lengthwise by a broad passage, along which, on the ground floor, were twelve cells, six on a side and eight by ten each and facing each other. And above again a second tier of what were known as balcony cells — five on a side.
In this, to be sure, were no such small and gloomy cells as those which characterized the old, for there the ceiling was low and the sanitary arrangements wretched. But by contrast with the older room, they had the enormous disadvantage of the unscreened if not uncurtained cell doors.
Besides, by housing all together in two such tiers as were here, it placed upon each convict the compulsion of enduring all the horrors of all the vicious, morbid or completely collapsed and despairing temperaments about him. No true privacy of any kind. By day — a blaze of light pouring through an over-arching skylight high above the walls. By night — glistening incandescents of large size and power which flooded each nook and cranny of the various cells. No privacy, no games other than cards and checkers — the only ones playable without releasing the prisoners from their cells. Books, newspapers, to be sure, for all who could read or enjoy them under the circumstances. And visits — mornings and afternoons, as a rule, from a priest, and less regularly from a rabbi and a Protestant minister, each offering his sympathies or services to such as would accept them.
But the curse of the place was not because of these advantages, such as they were, but in spite of them — this unremitted contact, as any one could see, with minds now terrorized and discolored by the thought of an approaching death that was so near for many that it was as an icy hand upon the brow or shoulder. And none — whatever the bravado — capable of enduring it without mental or physical deterioration in some form. The glooms — the strains — the indefinable terrors and despairs that blew like winds or breaths about this place and depressed or terrorized all by turns! They were manifest at the most unexpected moments, by curses, sighs, tears even, calls for a song — for God’s sake!— or the most unintended and unexpected yells or groans. Worse yet, and productive of perhaps the most grinding and destroying of all the miseries here — the transverse passage leading between the old death house on the one hand and the execution-chamber on the other. For this from time to time — alas, how frequently — was the scene or stage for at least a part of the tragedy that was here so regularly enacted — the final business of execution".